What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (21 page)

D
EEP IN THE
hair-care aisle of a supermarket, a shopper pops the top on a shampoo bottle and takes a sniff. What happens next is a cascade of decision-making: Does it smell too feminine? Is it refreshing, as the packaging claims? Does it smell like an effective antidandruff product? Will my spouse like it? Does it smell classy enough to justify the higher price? All these questions are asked and answered in two sniffs. To the casual observer, the shampoo sniffer is making a snap judgment—nothing more than an emotional reflex of “do I like it?” Yet in that brief moment, fragrance speaks to status (elegant, cheap, old-fashioned), functionality (cleansing, conditioning, therapeutic), and self-identity (feminine, edgy, safe). The scent is full of information, and the consumer is analyzing it. Fragrance speaks to the emotions, but it is more than mood music. It can carry a message to the mind. Once marketers master this sophisticated language, the sense of smell will become a full-fledged advertising medium.

Subliminal Scents

Any marketer who thinks of using smell wants to know how it works, so that he can build a strategy to take advantage of it. Conventional wisdom, slow to acknowledge new research results, still emphasizes emotion as the main psychological mechanism, and thus marketers continue to select scents based on their emotion-inducing qualities. But deciding how strong or weak to set the aroma level is a different issue, one that inevitably leads to questions about the nature of conscious awareness.

No topic in psychology fires the popular imagination as surely as subliminal perception. The mere phrase evokes (subliminally!) technicians in lab coats twiddling dials on a control panel as consumers sleepwalk to the checkout line with armloads of unwanted merchandise. Can a secret scent really turn us into zombie shoppers? Can we be made slaves to smell?

To a psychologist,
subliminal
has a fairly dry technical definition; it means “below the threshold of conscious awareness.” A subliminal stimulus is too weak to be perceived with certainty, yet strong enough to leave a brief, featherlight impression on the senses. These faint and fleeting perceptions, which elude the direct gaze of our attention, cannot be measured by the traditional methods of rating scales and adjective checklists. Instead, they must be measured by their indirect effects on other mental processes. For example, one can flash “DOG” onto a screen so quickly that a viewer has no time to read it, and can’t even be sure he saw anything. It is pointless to ask him to identify the word. Yet the flashed word causes a flicker of measurable brain-wave activity, and its lingering trace will be evident in subsequent word-association tests.

It is a deeply held belief of marketers that scented advertising works subliminally. For example, according to Sue Brush, senior vice president of Westin Hotels & Resorts, the chain’s
White Tea
fragrance is “one of those subliminal things you don’t necessarily advertise, but we hope it can help guests decompress after the rigors of the road.” Enthusiasts and detractors both believe that scent marketing is a form of mind control that operates in the murky zone of the subliminal, where a well-placed whisper is all that’s required to set off psychological chain reaction resulting, inevitably, in an opening of the consumer’s wallet.

A
CCORDING TO THE PSYCHOLOGIST
Anthony Pratkanis, popular enthusiasm for the subliminal has come in waves. The first arrived in 1957, when James Vicary claimed to have shown subliminal ads in a movie theater. Vicary said his messages—“eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola”—boosted Coke sales in the lobby by 18.1 percent and popcorn sales by 57.7 percent. In the Cold War era preoccupied with the brainwashing of soldiers and secret agents, Vicary’s claim generated enormous media coverage. Yet Vicary couldn’t or wouldn’t produce his data. Nor would he show anyone the tachistoscope he allegedly used to flash the ads onto the movie screen. He eventually admitted to
Advertising Age
that he fabricated the study to draw attention to his consulting business.

A second subliminal wave began in 1973, when Wilson B. Key published
Subliminal Seduction,
in which he claimed that sexually arousing images were hidden in printed advertisements. (This led to a brief fad at parties in the mid-1970s, where people squinted at whiskey ads in
Esquire,
looking for a sex orgy in the ice cube.) The original studies cited by Key were flimsy and lacked critical control groups. Though his theories were roundly dismissed by psychologists, Key—now an elderly man—continues to see penises embedded in advertising images wherever he looks.

The third and most recent wave of the subliminal fad came in the late 1980s and early 1990s with self-help audio tapes that promised everything from weight reduction to increased self-esteem. Driven partly by late-night infomercials, subliminal tapes became a $50-million industry, even though little or no scientific evidence existed that they worked as claimed.

It’s clear that we can absorb visual and auditory information without being consciously aware of it. Whether these fleeting perceptions affect our behavior as directly and purposefully as subliminal-advertising proponents claim is another story. Anthony Pratkanis finds no evidence that they do. I believe the same holds true for smell. There is, for example, solid evidence for subliminal odor perception. The German researcher Thomas Hummel snaked a millimeter-wide tube about three inches up the noses of volunteers. (Actually, he let them do it themselves—it’s less stressful.) The tube delivered a constant stream of warmed and humidified air, along with occasional pulses of odor, directly to the sensory surface of the nose. A wire inside the tube monitored electrical activity from the same surface. Scents too weak to be consciously detected nevertheless provoked a response in the sensory cells of the nose. Using different techniques, other researchers have observed the brain responding to scent at levels too low for the test subject to reliably detect. There is little question that odors can be registered subconsciously in the nose and the brain.

Psychologists in the Netherlands took techniques used to measure the indirect effects of subliminal sights and sounds and applied them to olfaction. They gave people an incidental exposure to the citrus scent of a familiar all-purpose cleanser. Most participants were unaware of the smell and of the purpose of the experiment. Yet those who inhaled the scent were faster at picking out cleaning-related words from a list, and were more likely to mention cleaning-related behaviors when asked to describe their routine daily activities. Given a crumbly cracker to eat, people who’d been exposed to the cleanser scent engaged in more crumb-sweeping and other tidying behavior than people who hadn’t been exposed. The subliminal scent activated a mental network of cleaning-related associations, later expressed through word and deed, but not in a readily exploitable way. People didn’t spontaneously mention brand names or rush out to buy a bottle of cleanser. Enhanced crumb-brushing is hardly the stuff of mind control.

That the nose and brain respond to subliminal smells under ultraprecise laboratory conditions is not surprising, but are the effects robust enough to make a difference in the real world? The classic demonstration of covert selling power dates back to 1932. Donald Laird had male students at Colgate University pose as market researchers and go door-to-door in Utica, New York. The young men presented housewives with four samples of identical silk stockings and asked them point to their favorite pair. The stockings varied only in smell: the unadorned product had a slightly rancid character; the others were lightly scented with either narcissus, a fruity note, or a sachet fragrance. Laird’s team completed 250 interviews before one suspicious lady called the cops, and when the police report made the local newspapers, the study’s cover was blown. Of the 250 women, only six were aware that the stockings were scented. Despite this, there was a clear influence of scent on stocking preference: 50 percent of the women chose the narcissus-scented pair, 24 percent chose the fruity pair, 18 percent chose the sachet scent, and the natural hose were selected by only 8 percent.

Smell alters our behavior in daily life, in the trivial sense that a whiff near lunchtime may steer us toward a burrito instead of a pizza. The subliminality of the message—whether I smell a pizza before I have a conscious desire to buy one—is of no more consequence than whether I heard a pizza ad on my commute that morning. In either case, the compulsion—or lack thereof—is about the same.

Still, subliminal advertising continues to frighten people who should know better. The European Chemoreception Research Organization, a society of smell and taste researchers, recently editorialized about a study done by some of its members, in which smells were presented along with odor-evocative words. The results: people found a cheesy aroma less unpleasant when it was paired with the phrase “cheddar cheese” than when it was paired with “body odor.” The power of suggestion was so strong that people reported that even clean air smelled bad when labeled “body odor.” This entirely predictable outcome was enough for ECRO to raise an alarm: “Unfortunately this fact offers powerful tools for manipulating the information and directing the choice of consumers towards particular foods, perfumes, [and] detergents,” a possibility that, “disturbingly,” could lead to “misleading messages.” Shocker! Ads seek to manipulate consumer choice. EU bureaucrats will have a field day drafting regulations banning smell fraud in advertising.

Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Communications Commission has no formal rules about subliminal advertising, smelly or otherwise. In fact, the FCC has investigated only one complaint about subliminal messages. In 1987 it found that Dallas radio station KMEZ-FM broadcast a program containing them. Which dastardly corporation was responsible for this outrage? Well…none, actually. The subliminals were hidden in an antismoking program aired on behalf of the American Cancer Society.

The idea of subliminal advertising continues to haunt the field. Merchants who use ambient scent are reluctant to talk about it because they don’t want the public to view them as zombie masters. They could defuse the issue by debunking the power of subliminals, but they don’t—perhaps because they too believe in it, if only a little bit. Subliminal perception is now something experts debate as they recommend fragrance levels for their retail clients. Michelle Harper, director of fragrance development at Ayrlessence, says, “You want it to be subliminal, especially in an environmental space.” On the other hand, Joe Faranda, chief marketing officer for International Flavors & Fragrances, says, “The scent no longer has to be working subliminally to be effective.” Who to believe? In my experience, when a scent calls attention to itself, people feel obliged to decide whether or not they like it. At that point they’re focused on the scent and not the store. Samsung’s corporate logoscent—suggestive of green melon—works because it is barely detectable; any stronger and customers would start looking for the fruit salad bar. There’s a difference between subtle and subliminal.

Rage Against the Machine

When the English perfumer Eugene Rimmel created the first mass-marketed perfumes in the mid-1800s, he also invented various ways of promoting them through scented print advertising. He gave away scented almanacs and scented fans. He placed scented ads in London theatre programs. These efforts were not met with universal applause. His sophisticated contemporaries turned up their noses at the theatre programs; these aromatic momentos of “rank commercialism” were seen as intrusive, crass, and annoying. The equivalent in our time are scented perfume ads in magazines. Calvin Trillin has inveighed against the ones he found in
Vanity Fair
; they “revived old thoughts about whether the Drafters could have envisioned the possibility that the freedom of expression guaranteed in the First Amendment would someday extend to smelling up the place.”

The scented ads that offend Mr. Trillin are the legacy of Fred and Gale Hayman, the California entrepreneurs who started the Giorgio of Beverly Hills boutique on Rodeo Drive. In 1982 they launched a marketing campaign for a perfume named after their store. They began by mailing perfume-soaked blotters to their local clients, but to get samples under noses on a national scale they needed a cheaper method. Their ad for
Giorgio,
in the May 1983
Vogue,
was the first ever to use the ScentStrip Sampler, a new product from Arcade Marketing. This was the now-familiar printed page with a glued-down flap; as the flap is pulled open, microdroplets of fragrance oil in the glue are ruptured and scent is released. Readers complained that the magazine reeked of
Giorgio,
but sales boomed and the magazine industry never looked back. (Determined to reach even more nostrils, the Haymans unleashed the Spritzer Ladies from Hell, teams of white-and-yellow-jacketed reps who aggressively misted millions of people in department stores.) The
Giorgio
perfume, formulated with an extraordinarily high ratio of fragrance oil to alcohol, was brassy, penetrating, and easily recognized. Fancy restaurants banned it, and wearers caused near-riots in elevators across the country.
Giorgio
-bashing became a snob sport. Outside of Le Cirque and the refined precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, however, the perfume was a blockbuster.

Scented print ads are enjoying a new renaissance at the moment. Fox-Walden Films recently paid $110,000 to run a scented full-page movie ad in the
Los Angeles Times.
The
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
are said to be considering rub-and-smell ads. Each year the annual report of spice maker McCormick & Company features a different aroma; in 2006 a disappointingly thin nutmeg rendition struggled to be noticed above the stink of the ink. A cover of the German scientific journal
Angewandte Chemie
smelled like lily of the valley, in order to draw attention to an article on odor receptors. The core market for scented ads has always been women’s fashion magazines; the publisher of
Allure
claims that 85 percent of her readers immediately try the scent strips in her book.